The Way We Were

September 21, 2025

The ways in which we think about, write, and read bedtime stories for children, are all wrong.

Children do not care a fig for the mental states of choo choo trains, spiders, or octopuses. They only put up with that kind of thing because they like to sit on our laps; they like to be read to; they like colored pictures; and they like us grownups.

What children like, are scary stories.

That is why I have written my first children's’ book; Bedtime Stories to Terrify Children; so that the grownups will have some stories to read to children which will cause the children to jump readily into bed each night.

The problem here, is that children do not see the world as we, the grownups, do.

Children believe naturally in spirits, some of which may be good, and some of which may be evil. Their imaginations are stronger than ours. They believe in magic more strongly than Humean causation. They believe readily that the household dog may be transformed into a tooth slathering beast, should the proper words be read from an ancient manuscript. They believe in the mysteries of the moon, and in the powers of moonlight, for good, or for ill, depending upon whether the drawing of a one eyed toad is there to receive the moonbeams. They are not naturally unitarians, but are prepared to believe in panoplies of spirits, gods, and ghosts which roam the world, especially at night. So, if you tell the children a story about an evil squirrel who drags children through a ragged hole in space and time to another world, they are prepared to believe it. They kind of figure, sure, some squirrels might do that if allowed to.

However, children believe in the ineluctable goodness of outcomes in this life. The endings need not be happy. Children kind of already know that no one really knows what happy is. But there has to be a fairness to it; something about which the child can say… well at least the scumbag squirrel learned something from it all.

The eight stories of Bedtime Stories, I hope, have such endings. Grownup readers can serialize them, cut and paste them, modify them, and continue on by making up new stories, when these eight are done.